No Time to Lose for Michelle Bridges

Michelle Bridges leads a workout class at a studio in New York as part of a campaign to raise awareness of her weight-loss program.CreditTina Fineberg for The New York Times

By Taffy Brodesser-Akner

Dec. 31, 2013

The Beverly Hills offices of the Narrative Group, the public relations firm tasked with making the Australian fitness personality Michelle Bridges into a household name in the United States, are pristine white with hot-pink accents on signage, laptops and smartphones.

In the six months the firm was given to make Americans aware of Ms. Bridges and her online weight-loss program, 12 Week Body Transformation (12WBT), its conference room was home to the following interactions: a strategy meeting with Blue State Digital, the marketing firm that worked for President Obama’s campaign; discussions about which photos made Ms. Bridges look younger, and how maybe the ones in which she had bangs made her look too severe; analysis of focus groups; invocations of a technology in which Internet ads would follow users around other websites until they signed up for the program, all because they had clicked on Ms. Bridges’s ad once; a conversation that was supposed to be light but turned a little tense about the fact that the American firms seem to keep saying “12-Week Body” as an abbreviation for the program; many debates over American vernacular; conversations over transferring recipes to an American audience, most notably finding substitutes for kangaroo as a protein source; and crinkly conference calls during the one or two hours when parties in California and Australia are both reasonably awake for passionate negotiations of Ms. Bridges’s time.

At any given point there are more than 100 people working on Ms. Bridges’s brand, but there is only one Michelle Bridges.

In Australia, Ms. Bridges is best known for her role as the trainer on that country’s edition of the TV show “The Biggest Loser.” She has lines of housewares and workout clothes sold through discount department stores. She is also the personality behind 12WBT, an interactive online diet and fitness program in a country for which obesity rates have grown to 63 percent in recent years. Since 12WBT was introduced in January 2010 in Australia, more than 250,000 people have joined at $199 Australian ($176) or 12 weekly payments of $19.99.

Now she’s bringing 12WBT to the United States, along with the rest of her brand, in an attempt to gain a share of the lucrative diet industry. It remains to be seen, though, if there’s room for another diet guru in a saturated field.

“Losing weight is a science,” Ms. Bridges said recently over breakfast at Mr. C in Los Angeles, where she ordered an egg white omelet and black coffee. “Keeping weight off is a psychology.”

It is this distinction between psychology and science (though psychologists might debate the notion that their field isn’t a science) that Ms. Bridges believes gives her an edge. She said 12WBT attacks “problematic thinking” with a full month of “preseason,” in which dieters clean out their refrigerators, have important conversations with their families, prepare their schedules and, most importantly, practice the fine art of “getting real,” Ms. Bridges’s favorite term for overcoming the thinking that led them to becoming overweight in the first place.

“Science and psychology are separate,” she said, every word punctuated with a pleading intensity that never let up. “I can get weight off anyone. I can get weight off anyone. Keeping it off, that’s a different ballgame. That’s your head.” (How well they keep it off is anyone’s guess, though. Like other diet companies, 12WBT says it does not keep track of how their clients do long-term, but that some are so successful that they keep signing up.)

Ms. Bridges, 43, has bright blue eyes, a deep orangy tan and shoulders that seem more like a diagram of the muscular system. She leaned back, mock exhausted from having to explain her philosophy yet again. She took a bite of toast. “Yes,” she said, shaking the bread, “I eat carbs.”

When Ms. Bridges was a fitness trainer at a gym, said her ex-husband, Bill Moore (who owned that gym and is now her business partner), “she had this very empathetic way about her. Instead of saying, ‘I’m super fit and you’re not,’ she would be going: ‘This class is killing me, but I’m going to go harder. Come with me, come with me.’ ”

He and Ms. Bridges would sit on the couch at home, he said, and watch the first season of Australia’s “Biggest Loser,” which featured Bob Harper and Jillian Michaels, the trainers from the American version of the show. Ms. Bridges would say to Mr. Moore, “I could do that job.”

Before long, Ms. Bridges was doing fitness segments for a local morning show; soon after that, she was approached by “The Biggest Loser” for their second season. Those appearances led to books and fitness DVDs.

She got her message out, but wanted to go bigger. She thought about doing training camps, but Mr. Moore suggested using the Internet. Ms. Bridges demurred, and they brought in an old friend, a tech guy named Tim Phillips. Over drinks one night with Mr. Phillips and his wife, Amelia, 12WBT was born.

It had been progressing well — the November 2012 session saw the enrollment of more than 40,000 Australians — when Ms. Bridges, Mr. Moore and the Phillipses began to consider expanding to the United States. “I said from the beginning, ‘I’m going to start doing other things within the fitness world and I’m also going to tackle what I can see coming is the tsunami of obesity,’ ” Ms. Bridges said.

She didn’t take a second bite of her toast for the remainder of the meal.

The diet guru is not a new convention in the United States. In the 19th century, a religious leader named Sylvester Graham (who invented the cracker that bears his name, though his was not the sugary one that exists today) believed that optimal health could be achieved through limiting the spice and variety in food and through the exclusion of meat from the diet.

Later came Horace Fletcher, known as “the Great Masticator,” who advocated chewing food into a paste for optimal strength. This tradition continues to modern examples like Nathan Pritikin, Jane Fonda, Robert Atkins and Suzanne Somers.

“The search for the next diet guru tells us more about American culture than it does about how the body metabolizes food,” said Deborah Levine, a medical historian at Providence College. “There’s this idea that there’s this one perfect diet, and if we were to just find it, we’d have our solution.”

Ms. Bridges enters a country flush with homegrown diet and fitness gurus. There are a host of people like Tracy Anderson, Shaun T and Jillian Michaels, determined to get people down to fighting weight.

But, said Anne McKevitt, Ms. Bridges’s business coach: “I don’t see the trainers as real competitors, because they’re not, The competition is more likely to be the big corporate giants than the individual trainers: the Weight Watchers, the Nutrisystems and the Jenny Craigs. They’ve taken market share in Australia.”

Ms. Bridges can edge out this competition by speaking for her own brand, Ms. McKevitt said. “They can only have spokespeople,” she said. “And people see through that spokesperson thing because they’ve seen the Kirstie Alleys jump onboard and then struggle. You know, people are going, ‘It’s a crowded space.’ It’s a crowded space, but people aren’t really losing weight, are they? So there’s more and more people who need help.”

“Michelle is different,” she said. “Michelle is real.”

Ms. McKevitt’s yearlong plan for the Michelle Bridges brand includes an American apparel line, vitamin supplements, footwear, beverages, prepared foods and more, along with deals to sell them via a direct TV marketing retailer, a big-box store and a national retailer. The P.R. company oversaw the renting of a house in the Hamptons. where Ms. Bridges could meet with various editors of women’s magazine editors, who had been invited for the weekend to be introduced to her and to work out with her. Meetings were arranged with the producers of Bloomberg TV and shows like “The Doctors,” “The Queen Latifah Show,” “Katie,” “The Chew” and the “Rachael Ray Show.”

For her part, Ms. Bridges has pushed through near-constant jet lag from her trips back home to Australia, showing up each time to talk about the art of being real.

Renee Miles, a 34-year-old corrections officer who lives in Brooklyn with her five children, weighed 254 pounds when she and some co-workers bet on who could lose the most weight in the run-up to the holidays. Ms. Miles had joined Instagram looking for friends and maybe some diet tips when she was targeted by 12WBT’s free five-week trial program, which was used to test the American market.

Ms. Miles had been having difficulty getting up the stairs at her children’s school for a parent-teacher conference. One of her children had joked that perhaps the teacher should come down and meet her. But Ms. Miles had tried everything from Weight Watchers, where she had lost weight temporarily but found that her skin was flabby from lack of exercise, to the Insanity workout by Shaun T, which left her knees in pain from all the jumping. She also considered Herbalife, but she said the price was prohibitive.

Ms. Miles received guidance at the gym through the 12 Week Body Transformation Sneak Preview, the name for the trial created by the Narrative Group to test the American market, create awareness and conduct focus groups. She learned on which machines to use and how to use them. She could print prepared shopping lists for her visits to the grocery store. “The mind-frame thing is the difference,” she said. “It makes you a stronger person.”

By the end of the five weeks, Ms. Miles had lost 23 pounds. She won the wager and bought new clothes with her winnings. As the test run ended, participants were encouraged to attend a meeting with Ms. Bridges at Cedar Lake, a dance studio in Manhattan where they could work out with her.

Ms. Miles attended for what she said was the toughest workout of her life. When she approached Ms. Bridges afterward, Ms. Miles began to cry. “She didn’t realize what she did for me was she changed my life,” she said of Ms. Bridges. “You never know what your body could do until you do it. If you told me you were going to run on a treadmill for 15 minutes, I’d say you were out of your mind. It’s only your mind that thinks you can’t.”

Ms. Bridges said of the process, “There’s a lot of mind-set lessons that help people start to shift their thinking or shift their perception on food or exercise or themselves. The whole yo-yo — up- down, off-on, in-out — you know, I think that’s far more damaging than being overweight will ever be because that stuff just messes with your head.”

She added: “It’s almost like psychological obesity. Then I come in with my sledgehammer and go, ‘Right, let’s get real.’ ”